Afghanistan: Is It Really the End Game?

“Gunmen in Pakistan on Monday set ablaze five trucks carrying NATO equipment
out of Afghanistan as the international military alliance winds down it combat mission
there, officials said.”

-Agence
France Presse, 3/1/13

There is nothing that better sums up the utter failure of America’s longest
war than getting ambushed as you
are trying to get the hell out of the county. And yet the April 1 debacle in
Baluchistan was in many ways a metaphor for a looming crisis that NATO and the
U.S. seem totally unprepared for: with the clock ticking down on removing most
combat troops by 2014, there are no official negotiations going on, nor does
there seem to be any strategy for how to bring them about.

“I still cannot understand how we, the international community and the
Afghan government have managed to arrive at a situation in which everything is
coming together in 2014—elections, new president, economic transition, military
transition—---and negotiations for the peace process have not really started,”
said Bernard Bajolet,
former French ambassador to Kabul and current head of France’s foreign
intelligence service.

When the Obama administration sent an additional 30,000 troops into
Afghanistan in 2009 as part of the “surge,” the goal was to secure the
country’s southern provinces, suppress opium cultivation, and force the Taliban
to give up on the war. Not only did the surge fail to impress the Taliban and
its allies, it never stabilized the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar.
Both are once again under the sway of the insurgency and opium production has
soared. What the surge did manage was to
spread the insurgency into the formally secure areas in the north and west.

With the exception of the current U.S. commander in Afghanistan, virtually
everyone has concluded that the war has been a disaster for all involved.

The Afghans have lost more than two million dead over the past 30 years,
huge sections of the population have been turned into refugees, and the country
is becoming what one international law enforcement official described to the New York Times as “the world’s first true narco state.” According
to the World Bank, 36
percent of Afghans are at or below the poverty line, and 20 percent of Afghan
children never reach the age of five.

The war has cost American taxpayers over $1.4 trillion, and, according to a
recent study, the final butcher bill for
both Iraq and Afghanistan will top $6 trillion. The decade-long conflict has
put enormous strains on the NATO alliance, destabilized and alienated
nuclear-armed Pakistan, and helped to spread al-Qaeda-like organizations
throughout the Middle East and Africa.

Only U.S. Gen. Joseph “Fighting Joe” Dunford, head of
the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) thinks the war on the
Taliban is being won, and that the Afghan Army is “steadily gaining in
confidence, competence, and commitment.” Attacks by the
Taliban are up 47 percent over last year, and the casualty rate for Afghan
soldiers and police has increased 40 percent. The yearly desertion rate of the
Afghan Army is between 27 percent and 30 percent.

In theory, ISAF combat troops will exit Afghanistan in 2014 and turn the war
over to the Afghan Army and police, organizations that have yet to show they
can take on the insurgency. One of the Army’s crack units was recently overrun in
eastern Afghanistan. Given the fragility
of the Afghan government and its army, one would think that the White House should
be putting on a full court press to get talks going, but instead it is
following a strategy that has demonstrably failed in the past.

The tactic of “shooting and talking” that is central to the surge has
produced lots of casualties but virtually zero dialogue, hardly a surprise.
That approach has never worked in Afghanistan.

Part of the problem is that the call for talks is so heavily laden with
caveats and restrictions that that they derail any possibility of real
negotiations, among them are that the Taliban have to accept the 2004 constitution
and renounce violence and “terrorism.”

However, the Taliban argue that the 2004 constitution was imposed from the
outside, and they want a role in re-writing it. As for “terrorism,” the Taliban
denounced international terrorism five years ago.

As Anatol Lieven, a
King’s College London professor, senior researcher at the New American
Foundation, and probably the best informed English language writer on
Afghanistan, points out, the Americans consistently paint themselves into a
corner by demonizing their opponents.

That, in turn, leads to “a belief that any enemy of the United States must
inevitably be evil. Not only does this tendency make pragmatic compromises with
opponents much more difficult (and much more embarrassing should they
eventually be reached), but, consciously or unconsciously it allows the US
government and media to blind the US public, and often themselves, to the evils
of America’s own allies.”

For instance, the Americans will not talk with the Haqqani group, a Taliban
ally, even though it is the most effective military force confronting the NATO
occupation. The same goes for Iran, even though Teheran played a key role in
organizing the 2003 Bonn conference that led to the formation of the current
Kabul government. Iran also has legitimate interests in the current war. Because
opium and heroin are not a major problem in the US, Washington can afford to
turn a blind eye to the Afghan government’s alliance with drug dealing
warlords. Heroin addiction, however, constitutes a national health crisis in
Iran and Russia.

It is not exactly clear what will happen in 2014. While American combat
units are supposed to be withdrawn, in accordance with a treaty between
NATO and the government of President Harmid Karzai, several thousand Special
Forces, trainers, CIA personal, and aircraft will remain on nine bases until 2024.
That agreement was the supposed reason for the massive suicide bomb May 16 in
Kabul that killed 6 Americans and 16 Afghans. Hezb-i-Islami, an
insurgent group based around Kabul and the eastern part of the country, took
credit for the attack.

That attack underlines how difficult it will be to forge some kind of
agreement.

Hezb-i-Islami pulled off the bombing, but the party’s political wing is a
major player in the Karzai government, holding down the posts of education
minister and advisor to the president. Hezb-i-Islami leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
is also a rival of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, and the bombing could just as
well have been a maneuver to make sure Hezb-i-Islami has a seat at the table if
talks start up. Hekmatyar has offered to negotiate with NATO in the past.

The Taliban itself is divided into several factions, partly because the
Americans’ systematic assassination of high and mid-level Taliban leaders has
decentralized the organization. The Taliban is increasingly an alliance of
local groups that may have very different politics.

The Haqqanis’ have a strong presence
in Pakistan, which requires that the organization maintain cordial relations
with Pakistan’s Army and intelligence services. They scratch each other’s
backs. So any understanding to end the war will have to be acceptable to the
Haqqanis and Islamabad. No agreement is possible without the participation of
both.

Instead of recognizing the reality of the situation, however, the Obama
administration continues to ignore the powerful Haqqanis, sideline Iran, and to
alienate the average Pakistani though its drone war.

As complex as the situation looks, a solution is possible, but only if the
White House changes course. First, the “shoot and talk” nonsense must end
immediately, General Dunford’s hallucinations not withstanding. If the U.S. couldn’t smother the insurgency
during the surge, how can it do so now with fewer troops? All the shooting will
do is get a lot more people killed—most of them Afghan soldiers, police, and civilians
caught in the crossfire—and sabotage any potential talks.

According to Lieven, the Taliban are far more realistic about the current
situation than is the White House. Last
July, he and a group of academics met “leading figures close to the Taliban”
during a trip to the Persian Gulf. He says there was “a widespread recognition
within the Taliban that while they can maintain a struggle in the south and
east of Afghanistan indefinitely,” they could never conquer the whole country.
Further, “in their own estimate,” they have the support of about 30 percent of
population. A recent Asia Foundation poll came to a similar conclusion.

While the Taliban refuse to negotiate with the Karzai government, Lieven
says they told the delegation, “there can be no return to the ‘pure’ government
of mullahs,” and “most strikingly, they said that the Taliban might be prepared
to agree to the US bases remaining until 2024.” The latter compromise will not
make the Iranians, Chinese, or Russians very happy—not to mention Hezb-i-Islami—but
it reflects a deep-seated philosophy in Afghan politics: figure out a way to
cut a deal.

The Taliban’s rejection of talks with the Kabul government means that going
ahead with next year’s presidential election is probably a bad idea. An
all-Afghan constitutional convention would be a better idea, with elections
postponed until after a new constitution is in place.

There are numerous issues that could sink a final agreement because there
are many players with multiple agendas. Regardless, those agendas will have to
be addressed, even if not quite to everyone’s satisfaction. And everyone has to
sit at the table, since those who are excluded have the power to torpedo the
entire endeavor. This means all the combatants, but also Iran, India, China,
Russia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.

And the White House needs to get off its butt. Afghan President Karzai, just
returned from an arms buying spree
in India, asked New Delhi to increase its presence in Afghanistan. This will
hardly be popular with Pakistan and China, and Islamabad can make serious
mischief if it wants to.

The ambush in Pakistan brings to mind Karl Marx’s famous dictum about
history: it happens first as tragedy, then as farce.

The first time this happened was during Britain’s first Anglo-Afghan War
(1839-42), when Afghans overran an East India Company army retreating from Kabul.
Out of 4,500 soldiers and 12,000 civilians, a single assistant surgeon made it
back to Jalalabad.

The most recent ambush certainly had an element of farce about it. Four
masked gunmen on two motorbikes forced the trucks to stop, sprinkled them with
gasoline and set the vehicles ablaze. One driver received a minor injury.

There is no need for a chaos-engulfed finale to the Afghan War. There is no
reason to continue the bloodshed, which all the parties recognize will not
alter the final outcome a whit. It is time for the White House to step up and
do the right thing and end one of the bloodiest wars in recent history.